Provisioning Smart City Infrastructure

Realizing IoT Cloud systems in practice is a challenging endeavor, especially when it comes to provisioning large-scale systems with highly diversified resources in terms of capabilities, consumption and runtime governance. In this chapter, we present the concept of software-defined IoT units, a novel approach to IoT Cloud Computing that encapsulates fine-grained IoT resources and IoT capabilities in well-defined APIs. The software-defined IoT unit provides a unified view on accessing, configuring and operating IoT Cloud systems. We further present a framework for dynamic, on-demand provisioning and deploying of IoT Cloud systems built upon the introduced units. By automating provisioning processes and supporting managed configuration models, our framework simplifies provisioning and enables flexible runtime customizations necessary for supporting the envisioned Cyber-Human Smart City scenarios.